Ingrid Caven

Jean-Jacques Schuhl is a Parisian dandy who lives with Ingrid Caven and who had not published a book for twenty years until this one.

"Adolf Hitler, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Yves Saint Laurent—German-born cabaret singer Ingrid Caven's life flowed around these icons of 20th century European counterculture . . . a collage of that strange postwar period in Europe of high artifice, drugs, terrorism, leather jackets and cinema."—Los Angeles Times Book Review"The novel . . . could be read as an intimate, literary dialogue between France and Germany (Caven is German and Schuhl is French and Jewish). That such a dialogue can be embodied in a single female character as seen through the eyes of her lover is a testament to Schuhl's originality and narrative imagination."—Speakeasy" . . . a semifictional 2000 Prix Goncourt winner about the vagaries of 1970s European counterculture . . . Schuhl's staccato yet contemplative prose (transl. from the French by Michael Pye) illuminates celebrity excesses against a decadent and violent world backdrop."—Publishers Weekly"[Ingrid Caven in] . . . her many metamorphoses: a bohemian Madame Bovary, a redheaded noir vamp, an aristocrat in a boa, a singing sleepwalker."—Frédéric Bonnaud, Les Inrockuptibles"Magnificent and violent, strange and disquieting. Provocative and harshly moving."—Josyane Savigneau, Le Monde Livres